Still shambling the streets of the city Nelson Algren defined, I am the Monster in a madhouse refined. Burma Shave.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

July 4th, 1959

In some Midwestern town, some kid used the Hypno-Coin he bought to make his mother OD on her Carbital, get his tyrant father to down some Thorazine with his blended scotch, so that the kid could look at Coca-Cola beauties and enjoy the company of his giant frogs. If you know what I mean.

The pharm ads are a revelation -- they must have appeared in medical journals. Now, the emphasis has shifted to the consumer side. There was a time in the not-too-happy past, when Thorazine, real or bootleg, was a street drug for kids who wanted to "get off" on anything they could get their hands on (double entendre probably not intended). Even though, if you wandered the parts of the city where many psych patients were living in halfway houses, you'd know that Thorazine could have been marketed under the jazzier name "Instant Zombie."

And hyno-coins would be rendered unnnecessary except as something to throw in tollway booths, like Necco Wafers.

Do you remember in the 60's and 70's when soda still tasted like soda because it came in glass bottle with real steel corks over them, and you had to pay a deposit per bottle? And, RC came with prizes under the corks? You would scrape off the real cork circle and revealed change and occasionally a 5 dollar winner? There used to be a corner store in my neighborhood, ok it was the corner if you called the alley a corner. They used to cash out the RC corks and then there was a real Ice Cream and Sodas shop right at 47th and Western. I once had two 5 buck caps so I bought a real green river float. But the real treasure aside from being able to get both Mad and Cracked Magazines was the packet of sea monkies and the magic growing rocks I got. That soda shop used to sell all the stuff you could buy from the back of the magazine. Seeing it up close ruined most of it, but those things were like gold- hell they really worked.

Even though I still have tiny glass shards in my leg from dropping a large bottle of Pepsi in the kitchen when I was a kid, I wish that we could have a choice of getting drinks in glass bottles, now that word is out that many polymer containers out-gas, or leak, cancer-causing hormones into their contents.